Inhalt: The General Approach of the Project The STAGES project was designed on the basis of three general approaches, which informed the way the Action Plans were built and the kind of measures which were included.
The first approach involves integrating different strategies comprehensively aimed at inducing structural change processes, i.e.:
- making research institutions an enabling environment for women’s progress and working lives (including support to work-life balance and early-career phases);
- promoting the sex and gender dimensions in the image of science, in science education and in the very process of research and innovation;
- promoting women in different kinds of scientific leadership positions.
The second approach concerns negotiating with internal stakeholders, each time addressing the most relevant (different leaderships, administrative staff, researchers, students, the public at large). The actions considered were aimed at negotiating change at four levels:
- the interpretive level (i.e., raising awareness of gender arrangements within the organisation and of the relevance of the issue, so as to negotiate a common understanding of the problems to be addressed);
- the symbolic level (i.e., redressing the masculine symbolism of science, so as to support women scientists’ visibility and remove stereotyped images of women scientists and science itself);
- the institutional level (i.e., negotiating change in the “rules of the game”, so as to modify the overt or hidden structures of women’s discrimination);
- the operational level (i.e., negotiating to translate good will, declarations or decisions into actual actions in a reasonable time).
The third approach focuses on the dynamics of change and it entails the design of inclusive implementation teams and the identification of actual or potential “transformational players” within and outside the organisation to act as catalysts for change. From this perspective, the teams would engage a growing number of relevant stakeholders and to build alliances with other active groups so to take advantage of their supportive attitudes.
Features and targets of the Guidelines
Guidelines for implementation
After more than fifteen years since the first European Commission’s policy efforts on the gender-and-science issue (not to speak of North American experiences), many guidelines, recommendations and policy documents now exist about how to promote gender equality in scientific institutions, addressing different aspects of the problem and targeting policy-makers at different levels. These tools (see for instance: European Commission, 2012; genSET, 2010; National Academy of Science, 2006; LERU, 2012; PRAGES, 2009; Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2012), which include the contributions of European and international experts and scholars, present principles and lines of action that can potentially be applied in any organisational context and represent the indispensable knowledge base and starting point for any effort oriented to gender equality in scientific institutions.
At the same time, a growing body of empirical knowledge is being accumulated deriving from the direct practice of programmes which, like STAGES, have been launched in many universities and research institutes across Europe (see for instance: Genova, De Micheli, Zucco, Grasso and Magri, 2014).
The STAGES Guidelines aim to contribute to this process of deriving new insights about the actual implementation process of gender equality-oriented projects in scientific institutions. For this reason this document does not have the ambition of presenting a new original set of principles and recommendations on the necessary components of a gender equality programme, but focuses on the know-how which was gained in the implementation of the STAGES Action Plans. Therefore, the focus is on implementation strategies, through the presentation of the different solutions envisaged by the partners to achieve their objectives.
As a consequence, the Guidelines presented here, practice-based as they are, can be somewhat unsystematic, in that they only contain elements which emerged from the implementation of the five Action Plans, with no claim to be exhaustive. On the other hand, they have the advantage of looking in depth at implementation issues based on experience in five different organisational settings, so that the reader is more likely to find resonance with the situation at her/his institution with its particular implementation challenges and dynamics.
A specific target The STAGES Guidelines are aimed at people working in a scientific organisation who, be it in the framework of a funded project or independently, are willing to launch a programme for gender equality.
They can be leaders at different levels of the organisation or they can just be part of it. As it clearly emerges from the STAGES experience, they will have to build in any case a strong set of alliances, both with leaders and with researchers and staff, before starting to design and implement the programme, as no top-down or bottom-up effort alone is sufficient to trigger the complex change process which is needed to make a significant impact.
This does not mean of course that these Guidelines are not relevant to decision-makers outside universities and research institutions. They can in fact be inspirational for policies both at national and at European level.
Schlagwörter:action plan; Monitoring; policy making; research organization
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Wissenschaftspolitik
Dokumenttyp:Graue Literatur, Bericht